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Welcome to Revenews numero 9️⃣.
🤑 There were deals done and interesting podcasts in newsletter-land last week.
Quick summaries aside, lets dive in! 🚀
My favourite approach to LinkedIn selling
Another newsletter newsletter
Why this newsletter was acquired
Inbox Banter
How To Sell in LinkedIn Without Pissing People Off
LinkedIn is a goldmine for sales. It’s also a clusterf*ck of desperate, unprepared and unpersonalised, sales messages. I know you know what I mean.
I’ve divided this piece in two parts:
(1) Short term, outbound sales do’s and don’ts.
(2) Long term, authority building and lead generation for newsletter people.
🎯 Short Term - Outbound Sales
How to cold outreach in LinkedIn.
🛑 Don’t pitch slap
To be clear, I define pitch slapping as:
You connect with the prospect, and include an empty, or very generic ‘expanding my network’ note. You soon after message them pitching them your product/newsletter.
Why is this bad? To be frank, it pisses people off, they accept you into their network only for you to start selling to them immediately. It used to be effective, but now that everyone and their dog is trying to sell on LinkedIn, it just isn’t.
It’s also inefficient, it takes 2 steps for you get your message in front of people, plus in a sub-optimal way.
1. Don’t pitch slap
Picture this…
You get an ambiguous connection, you accept
then..
Their 1st messaging is them diving straight into a pitch, telling you all about their product
At best it’s lazy, at worst it’s rude & ineffective
Don’t do it
I learnt this the hard way
— Dan Barry (@DanBarry27)
Nov 9, 2023
I used to be guilty of this because it’s fairly scalable (manually or automated). Take it from me, there are better ways.
Be better. Don’t pitch slap.
📝 Connection Note
Empty connection notes, despite having the highest cold acceptance rate, can be inappropriate and ineffective (as we just discussed).
Personally, I prefer an expectation-setting note. You’re giving them the chance to ‘accept’ the ensuing sales conversation, so it’s more honest/upfront. Plus, it takes only 1 step to get your message in front of them, so its more efficient too.
Here are two different formats I mainly use:
Sales Primer, catch attention and guide the conversation, with 3 sections:
Why them. A concise note about why them and why now. The most obvious example would be ‘I saw you sponsoring XYZ’, or ‘saw that you’re hiring for XYZ’.
Quick pitch: how you can help them, i.e. your audience.
CTA. This can be a simple ‘Let’s connect’. Relevant question-based CTAs work better, such as ‘Who should I chat to?’, or ‘Still looking for channels for the launch?’
Qualifying Question, a shorter specific question about the company, individual and/or their role. This could be:
“Hey (name) - do you look after the XYZ branding or issuer growth side of things ?” or…
“Hey (name) - does (company) also serve (your audience persona) ?”
If they accept, then you’ve just started a conversation about their target customer.
Bonus: Reach out to a sales person and ask them as above whether [company] serves [your audience]. They might assume there’s a sale potential, so the response rate will be super high, now it’s up to you to try get an introduction. This is slightly mischievous, but hey, they’ll understand, its their job. 😈
🤖 Automations
Earlier in my career I played around with LinkedIn automations. Honestly, not only are they a bit of a d*ck move, I found them ineffective. A templated message to 100’s of people just isn’t relevant enough to yield good results (reply rates = bad).
Not to mention the fact that you’ll piss a lot of people off, on a network designed for fostering relationships. For that reason, I’m out.
In theory an AI-based co-pilot tool could be a great addition, but I’m yet to see one that works well (in my humble opinion).
🙋♂️ My Favourite Approach
With this in mind, here’s my personal favourite way to drive short term sales.
A connection note as above. I have templates in notes, I do often still create the message from scratch to super personalise and best fit the circumstances.
If they accept, you’ll see a message and a network notification. Follow up with a quick message re-iterating why you are reaching out, add a similar case study, don’t repeat yourself.
The rule in sales is to follow up forever, personally in LinkedIn I haven’t seen much benefit from excessive follow ups, one more should do the trick. Again add (new) value, don’t repeat yourself.
Try and write in a fun, engaging, yet professional way [insert cheesey advice about ‘being yourself’ here].
I’ve dug out one example of this working in real time…
You can be more conversational vs email. Match the prospects tone.
🧔🏼♂️ Long Term
Another way to use LinkedIn for sales, is to build up authority and a trusted following. In time, this will theoretically generate a flow of inbound deals and/or build trust with an army of warm leads primed for outbound.
The TLDR on this is that you need to pick a niche, post consistently, add value, engage with others and learn great hooks. I’m not fantastic at LinkedIn, if you want to learn you should follow: Justin Welsh, Sam Browne and Anthony Carlton.
For newsletters specifically, I see a few ways you could aproach this:
Post adapted versions of newsletter content, spread NL brand awareness, hopefully attracting attention of the right people (Shout out to Jack Pilcher, who does this well).
Post about newsletter ‘stuff’. Your day-to-day operations. Build authority as a trusted media operator (Emanuel Cinca does this well).
Post about marketing or media buying to attract an audience of your ICP. The has huge potential , but has a big risk of coming across as salesy or disingenuous.
Post educational content helping subscribers. Here’s a CRAZY example, if you write about newsletters, post about how to optimise newsletter monetisation and start to try build authority with newsletter operators.
These will some newsletters better than others, generally I think authority building on LinkedIn has more sales impact if you’re B2B (sorry B2C!).
🏋️♀️ Optimise Your Profile
Think of your profile as a landing page, there’s a few things you can do which will increase conversion rates and educate prospects.
Have a clean professional looking profile picture, make it eye-catching if possible.
Include a concise attention grabbing bio about what you/your company does.
Include a link in your profile, this could be a newsletter link, calendly, or a b2b landing page.
Feature a post, either with the most engagement, or one that showcases what you do well.
Here’s a good article on profile optimisation.
🧐 Recommended Reading
Çiler runs Newsletter Circle. She teaches you how to take your newsletter to the next level.
How? In-depth weekly interviews with successful creators about how they built their publications from scratch. You'll find their growth, monetisation strategies, key performance metrics, tech stack, learnings, recommendations and more.
I’ve been reading it for ages, if you haven’t, SUBSCRIBE NOW. Genuine no-brainer if you’re in newsletter-land.
P.S. The recent edition with Michael Houck was very insightful
🤝 Tip News was acquired, here’s why Inbox Media splashed the cash.
📈 How he went from $0-$500k in 18 Months, including a $180k course.
👂 Creative revenue streams. Efficient organic growth. Get more referrals.
📊 How Ali Abdaal makes $5m as a content creator.
👏 Newsletter Predictions for 2024 (he’s done over $2m in revenue).
🏆 My Favourite Tools
Apollo - the most efficient way to find emails, send sequences, and more. The free version has unlimited email credits too.
Beehiiv - The best ESP out there, shipping more new features everyday, and very fairly priced!
WhoSponsorsStuff - The best way to find brands sponsoring other newsletters, track key newsletters, and view the campaign itself.
Sponsy - a few clients and friends say great things about Sponsy, it’s a great sponsorship manager and workflow automation for newsletters.
* I have used all these wonderful things, or have gotten personal recommendations from large newsletter operators. If they have an affiliate link, it might’ve found its way on here, if they don’t I recommend it anyway.
🤣 Inbox Banter
How do you reply to an email about someone freaking out at the Los Angeles International Airport?
Re:LAX